On the rocky climb to adulthood, between a sash full of Scout badges and glitter rock, I could find no purchase. When I hit twenty, I had so little sense of who I was that I was often caught off guard by my reflection in a mirror. I’d stop and look at the girl closely, hoping the image would reveal the essence. I was afraid that there just wasn’t a lot of me to me.
Oh, I knew it was out there somewhere, the rest of me, and it walked and talked and smelled like starched shirts and shaving cream. He was going to tell me who I really was. His love would be as rain on a seedling; he would water me and, lo, I would blossom. I wanted to be loved like Elizabeth Browning, I wanted Heathcliff, Dr. Zhivago, Atticus Finch, such a mensch. If my inner child was a seventh-grader who would never be one of The Cool, my outer adult would find happiness in being one of A Pair. And once I was, My Real Life would finally begin.
The man who would become Mia’s father was soft-spoken, cultured. Nick P. was a successful city planner, about six-foot-four, lanky and pale, with soft brown eyes and thick, silky blond hair that fell over his forehead. The real clincher was that there was mystery to him. Sudden black moods, silences for no reason. It was so Rochester. He was cool. I felt like Cinderella at the ball, I was full of happiness and hope. My Real Life was about to begin.
I don’t know which surprised me more—that he tended his lush garden au naturel or that it was full of marijuana. We had just gotten engaged after a year of dating and I’d moved into his place near downtown Chicago. I guess that explained the sudden mood shifts. He was relieved I finally knew. He’d been smoking pot, he said, twice a day for seven years.
“Twice a day? For seven YEARS?” I managed, shocked you could do that and still live. I knew next to nothing about drugs. I didn’t even drink.
“No wonder you’re so moody. And what’s with the naked thing?”
He rolled his eyes at me as if to say what a dummy, what a nerd. “A, you’re assuming I’d be different if I didn’t smoke it, and B, don’t be such a prude. Europeans don’t have a problem with it, the body is just part of nature.”
Thus began his pattern of justifying anything he did by making me the prude, the unsophisticated. He intimidated me with the threat of being uncool, a social death sentence.
I was afraid of losing him, but more afraid, however, of being arrested. I told him I wouldn’t marry a drug user and he promised he’d stop. It didn’t occur to me to question his integrity. Worse, it didn’t occur to me to question why someone had to anesthetize himself twice a day in the first place.
I met his family shortly before we married. They were worldly, well-connected, Mayflower stock, and Nick was their Golden Child. But, there was a tension and weirdness I simply couldn’t make sense of. His sister flaunted promiscuity like a virtue. I watched her sit in her dad’s lap by the pool. In a bikini. His father began his first conversation with me with a joke about a frog performing oral sex on a woman.
Nick seemed to age backward around his father, to shrink. His mom was nice if a bit odd. She was constantly trying to cheer up what was unquestionably the unhappiest clan I’d ever met. A family full of sarcasm and resentment.
On the one hand, I found them strangely fascinating—jaded, complex—there was almost a glamour to their misery. On the other hand, when I was with them, it felt like one of those Highlights magazine drawings with the caption, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Only I couldn’t see what it was because, now, I was in the picture.
It will be obvious later that what was most wrong with the image, the vulture in the teacup, was my unconscious capacity for denial. I would come to have an outright talent for it. Of all that would go horribly wrong with our marriage, this of all things would buy me a first-class ticket to hell. Each turning away, each bright smile and reconfigured reality another coin for the conductor. And I’d swear the view was beautiful all the way down.
The first time his mother visited after we were married, she forgot her robe. Declining one of mine, she breezed into Nick’s closet and emerged wearing one of his crisp white dress shirts over only her underclothes. Like a young woman who’s just spent the night at her boyfriend’s. She asked, “How do I look?” My new-daughter-in-law mouth said “Fine,” but my brain was zipping through its image inventory of American family life, to find a match, to make this normal.
Nick had been cold to her since she arrived. She said she thought his foul temper was because he wasn’t ready for marriage. Once she left, he told me it was because she rubbed his hand the whole way from the airport. You mean she held it? I asked.
“No, she stroked it for a really long time. It felt sexual. It really pissed me off.”
I had no idea what to make of this, so I stored it in the “How the grown-up world works” file, thought of it as one more lesson in sophistication. Though I did mention it to my mother.
“I think his mother has funny ideas about that kind of thing,” she said.
“What do you mean funny—funny how?”
“Well, she said something very weird on the phone to me last summer. We were talking about the Old Testament and incest came up, and she said, ‘You know, when you think about it, what could be more beautiful than a father making love to his daughter?’ I was floored. Maybe she thinks it’s beautiful to rub her son’s hand, too.”
Okay, so his mom’s weird, I thought, they’re all weird. He didn’t get to pick his family.
Nick was never the same after that visit. A bitterness arose in him; the family sarcasm emerged like an activated gene. I didn’t make the connection, see the significance. I brushed it aside like I would so many other things in the next few years, odd isolated things I shrugged off, cast aside like unmatched beads. Ones that didn’t match the shiny bauble I was making called My New Happy Family.
One day I would look down at them, all those beads, I would look carefully and notice that they did match, they did fit together. Perfectly. They made a necklace that would one day hang us both, Mia and me.
“I don’t think he’s ready to be a father, do you?”
I’d just told his mother I was pregnant. I’d gotten used to such comments, because whatever the family’s game plan for Nick’s life was, I didn’t seem to be following it.
I’d never been so excited in my life. I loved everything about pregnancy, about children. I didn’t understand the fear pregnant women had of the baby having something wrong. I wasn’t afraid of anything! And I was so sure it was a she that I hardly bothered with boys’ names. I read the latest research on what made babies happy and curious, I made colorful crib mobiles, sewed ruffle-edged flannel sleepers. I crawled on the floor to see what her view would be like and decorated a mini-world down at baseboard level for her.
I loved when she got hiccups in my belly, when she rolled around and kicked. As big as I grew, I never waddled, I was gliding, flying. I was running toward her arrival with my arms open, laughing. When I caught my reflection in the mirror then, I was smiling.
Mia’s birth was unbearable. I’d refused any medication so it wouldn’t contaminate my milk. The pain was so severe that when the nurses bore down to squeeze out the afterbirth, I bit one of them to make her stop. I was yelping like a speared beast when suddenly in front of me appeared a tiny, bewildered little face. The nurses stopped torturing me long enough to let me hold her.
I cooed and laughed. She was bobbing her little head in search of me. Then she clamped down on my breast and it was like lightning.
“Owwww, why is she biting, she’s not supposed to have teeth! Owww! This is killing me! I’m scaring her!” She hung on for life, would simply not let go.
“Bet you wish you had those meds, now, honey,” purred the nurse I had bitten. She pried Mia away from me and Mia opened her little mouth and started to wail, too. We were upsetting the whole ward with our hollering. We were operatic, the two of us.
We met each other crying, my baby girl and I.
Mia came home with me to cry some more. Sleep, nurse, shriek. She
pulled her skinny little legs up and cried and cried and cried. Nothing I did helped.
Then one gorgeous, sunny morning at three weeks, she pulled away from my breast and smiled big enough to crinkle her eyes, waving her little arms as she grinned up at me.
It was the first time I thought she loved me. I held her before me and we stayed like that for a long time, staring and smiling ourselves into each other.
That moment was the beginning of the forgetting. Of no longer knowing where I ended and she began.
Nick’s mother, as it turned out, was right. He wasn’t ready for fatherhood. He was coming unglued. Screwing up at work, crying when reprimanded for it. Saying hateful things about his family but drawn to them more and more. He would be foul one moment and giggling the next. I never knew which husband was coming home from work.
He began sleeping all the time and eating obscene amounts. I watched him eat an entire head of cauliflower, raw, holding it in his hand like an apple. After dinner. He works so hard, I thought, no wonder he’s so hungry. When he ate an entire sheet cake my mother made for a party, with his fingers, she finally blurted, “Wake up, Claire, nobody eats or sleeps that much unless they’re on drugs.”
So, there it was. Again. Only this time he made no promises; he didn’t even try to hide it. I had no choice but to acknowledge that whatever had made Nick need drugs every day when I first met him hadn’t gone away. The haunted, hungry part of him had never stopped hungering, he just grew better at hiding it. My Jekyll of a husband had been using everything at his disposal, including his considerable intellect, to keep his Hyde stoppered like a genie. Until the very thing that once shushed and petted it—seven years, twice a day—had now bit down hard and set him howling into our lives.
The next two years of my life were a dichotomy between the sheer joy of mothering Mia and the sheer madness of marriage to a man who sucked up more pot than air, along with who knows what else. But he wasn’t just a drug addict—he was a spoiled, narcissistic one. Nothing he ever did was wrong.
I had to argue with a grown man that you didn’t take your baby up on the roof with you to fix it while your wife was at the market (the neighbor almost called the police). That you didn’t put a baby to sleep beside a vaporizer (she got third-degree burns). That you didn’t walk around a toddling daughter naked, whether or not the Europeans did, or the Japanese, the Finns—he was running out of happy nations.
But, no, he’d say shrilly, drugs have nothing to do with my behavior! It’s you, you’re going to make her scared of heights, she loves helping Daddy! Who asked you to turn the vaporizer on before you went to bed! You’re going to teach her to be ashamed of her body! Sometimes, he’d use his soft, scholarly voice, explaining, rationalizing, trying in all sincerity to get me to see.
The only thing more pathetic than a druggie arguing the benefits of drugs is someone trying to convince them otherwise. It’s like arguing with the Mad Hatter, except you’re married to him.
Had I known, I would have spent my youth reading Thomas de Quincy and William Burroughs. As it was, I was armed only with self-blame, with I’m sorry, with Calm down, I’m worried, as if I had to apologize for his behavior. It’s understandable, I told myself, he’s worked to death. If I could just get him to stop the drugs, if I could just not let it bother me, or just let him get high at home. If-I-could-just had become the theme song of my marriage. The refrain of the Good Wife.
When I caught him getting high while driving Mia, I threatened to call his boss and tell him where the petty cash was going. He shot off the sofa and grabbed my purse. He screamed as he whipped everything in it across two rooms like a major league pitcher. He shrieked as he embedded lipstick in my cheerful yellow drywall, he can’t take it! he’s going to kill me! kill me!
Mia started to cry. I ran to her crib as he stormed to his car and sped away. He stayed gone for three days. Came back with no explanation and I didn’t ask, didn’t care. I had three whole days with no screaming, no pot stink, no flying objects.
If Mia was registering any of it, even that last screaming episode, you could hardly tell. She just wanted me to carry her through the world telling her the name of everything, telling her stories. She wanted me to make the stoplights change, make frozen bananas, sandcastles, and sea-shell queens named Mia. I called her my little monkey, the nickname I had as a little girl.
The sandy beach on Lake Michigan was our favorite place. All that splashy brightness. She loved to run across the sand, squealing and laughing as she looked back to make sure I was chasing her. I’d pretend I was running as fast as I could and still couldn’t catch her and she’d just giggle like mad and take off again. Running was only fun if I chased her.
Nothing ruined what it felt like to mother Mia, nothing sullied it. Every time I looked at Mia, I felt a jumping happiness in my chest that no fear or crazy husband could dim.
“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill us both!” Nick screamed as he jerked the wheel left and sent the car flying across the opposite lanes. We’d just left marriage counseling. It wasn’t his cup of tea.
“I hate you, bitch! I hate this marriage!” He slammed the car up a curb and into an empty lot. It was like the wide prairie before us. He hit the gas.
I heard a hoarse, “Stop, please stop,” as if some other woman were saying it. Terror had disembodied my voice from me, made me my own ventriloquist.
“I want you both gone! Take the baby and go!” He spun the car around, floored it, and we screeched back to the street, barely missing two cars.
And then the car sputtered. And died.
Oh, sweet miracle, we’d run out of gas. I gaped in amazement as the car rolled toward miracle number two—a gas station right in front of us.
One of lunacy’s virtues being instant mood change, Nick simply sighed and coasted to self-service as if nothing had happened. The second he screwed the gas cap on, I shot into the driver’s seat, started the car, and left him there.
The next day, he strolled in as serene as a Buddha, saying in his soft, stoned voice that we don’t need therapy anymore, “Therapy’s the problem, it just stirs things up.”
Therapy’s the problem? Stirs things up? That he could say that right after trying to kill me was stupefying. I, on the other hand, had sat up all night realizing that it wasn’t the fighting, the “stirring up,” that was the problem. It was the things being stirred up, the very things themselves. Like Alice in Wonderland, I’d been away from the real world so long, the one inhabited by sane people, that I’d forgotten that one shouldn’t have to argue about things like taking babies on roofs, naked gardening, or parenting on drugs. I’d fallen down a rabbit hole where miserable, intimidating creatures argued the ridiculous, the dangerous, and the perverse.
It was time to crawl out of the hole, which was going to take some doing. Like learning to bite my tongue at his screwy ideas. To smile and be agreeable. Because I wasn’t going to be as clueless getting out of this mess as going in. I would bide my time while I got a degree so I could support Mia. Then I’d take her and get out. Before he did kill me.
“See,” he said of the return of his sweet, accommodating wife, “what did I tell you? Therapy, schmerapy.”
Now that Mia spoke and walked, he spent more time playing with her. He’d giggle on the floor with her, pulling on a curly blonde wig from her dress-up box. I’ll wish later I’d never bought that wig. For years, she’d have nightmares of him wearing it.
While Nick was at work, I’d scour college catalogs at the library. Then I’d go home and pretend. This retreat from the battlefield was a relief for both of us. I was worn out from fighting him. He must have been worn out from fighting him, too. Because he mistook my new acquiescence for approval, permission. For freedom to be who he really was, at last.
Which would end up being so much worse.
3.
“What’s wrong with relaxing in my own home, Claire? There’s no one here but us.” One of us was an already walking, talking little girl. H
e’d started going around naked again. “You’re going to teach her to be ashamed of her body,” he clucked. He’d wait a week or two, then do it again.
One morning, I found him sitting in bed with her, reading the comics. He always slept nude, almost always woke up with an erection. I picked her up and walked out as I threw him his underwear.
“What’s your problem, she doesn’t know what it is.”
He reminded me that it was a natural thing, a normal part of life. Nothing is normal about you, I wanted to say.
“I can’t believe you did that without asking me first!” Nick yelled as he walked in the door from work.
“Asking you what?” I had no idea what he was talking about. Mia was helping me set the table. She grabbed onto my legs, scared.
“I hate bangs on women! I like to see her whole face!”
The Hatter was back. Later, when he’d calmed down, he decided to expound in earnest his theories on raising happy children. This should be interesting, I thought. He announced that henceforth Mia herself would decide on her haircut.
“You’d let a two-year-old make that choice? What if she wants to shave it off?”
“Of course,” he said, “it’s her body.”
“What if she wants to shave her legs and dye her hair when she’s three?”
“Of course, once she’s able,” he replied, encouraged by my calm responses.
“So, it’s sheer ability that sets a child’s limits, not parental guidance?”
He decided to reveal at last how he saw Mia’s unfolding future: “Children should be able to do whatever adults do once they’re able to.”
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